President Tim Hall

I had a fine lunch last week with the officers of FAM–”Future Alumni Members”–a new student organization created with the help of our alumni office. F.A.M. is an organization offering students opportunities to interact with APSU alumni and other students while strengthening their lifelong loyalty to Austin Peay State University. A crucial element in the success of a great university is alumni support, so we are trying to reach out to our students while they are still here at APSU to help them start thinking of alumni life after they graduate. We also want to engage members of F.A.M. with some of our current alumni, so that ties between our present and past students are strengthened.

Austin Peay’s new yearbook should be out in a few weeks, revived after an absence of more than 15 years by our student affairs division with the leadership of Tammy Bryant, our director of student affairs. The staff of The Monocle has been hard at work all year and spent the summer sorting through thousands of photographs and laying out the yearbook, which is being published by Jostens. I saw some of the preliminary pages this week, and they look fantastic. Tabitha Gilliland, our coordinator of student publications, has done a great job of providing guidance to our student staffers.

Soon after I arrived at Austin Peay two years ago, I pulled together a group of folks at the university to talk about making the Peay’s history more visible for our current students. A sense of tradition will help our students be more rooted and engaged in the university. The knowledge that their own years at Austin Peay will eventually find a place in that same history will, I hope, help inspire them to make the most of their time here.

The 2008-09 yearbook is on sale at http://www.jostensyearbooks.com.

We had a fine meeting of Austin Peay alumni in Atlanta last week, at the home of Wayne and Bobbi Pace. Wayne recently retired as chief financial officer for Time Warner, and he and Bobbi have settled into a new home in Atlanta. I never fail to hear stories at these events of how our alumni were helped and influence by their professors at Austin Peay. Years later, they still remember a faculty member who paid them special attention or gave them some crucial bit of advice. Not many alumni recall much about who was president of Austin Peay while they were here, but they have a lot to say about particular faculty or staff who influenced their lives for the better. And that’s as it should be.

Meetings such as we had in Atlanta are a way for APSU alumni to reconnect with one another and also to get a fresh view of the things happening on campus right now. We are working overtime to find new ways to stay in contact with our alumni, but nothing beats getting out on the road and seeing them.

Toward the end of July, I had the chance to attend the conference banquet for the Clarksville Writers’ Conference. This was my second year to attend the event, and I marvelled again at what a wonderful job Pat Winn and those who have worked with her have done in getting this conference established in Clarksville over the past five years. The keynote speaker at the banquet this year, John Egerton, was first rate, and though I did not have a chance to hear the other conference presenters, it looked like the conference had attracted some fine speakers. Austin Peay’s own Chris Burawa, the new director of our Center for Excellence in the Creative Arts, participated in the conference. Chris is a poet and a translator. He has a volume of poetry published under the title of The Small Mystery of Lapses, which I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed.

I hope those of you who missed the conference this time will plan on attending it next year: it’s a great addition to the cultural life of our community. Oh, and if you see Pat Winn about, thank her on behalf of all of us.